“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Rumi
Gosh.
I guess one of my biggest influences in my life is Joseph Campbell. His marriage to Jean Erdman is a model for the nuanced depths I seek in a relationship. I feel like I have already lived several lifetimes in one. I lived in the USA for 9 years (LA mostly). A couple years in Paris and South Korea and several years in India and South East Asia. Also South and Central America and Eastern Europe. The last year and a half I have sort of followed Campbell's example in his Woodstock years while he worked on the book "The Hero with a thousand faces." I orchestrated a similar hermitage in Dorset. I'm launching a fun publishing/merchandising company in the coming weeks (www.bodisutra.com) It is something I am passionate about and have designed it to support my inner and outer life for years to come. I work with a colleague in North Dorset (graphic designer/author) from the USA.
I love to cook good food and long walks. I have seen most of the planet so travelling I suppose is not my top priority any more (and I never travelled for travel's sakes - it just sort of followed in the process of following my bliss). I have a deep appreciation for natural history. I love good music.Hardly ever drink. Don't watch sport. Like to rollerblade. Enjoy camping. The mind has been my primary interest for most of my life.
This last year has been a profound shift in perspectives for me. I spent many years in India studying yoga with TKV Desikachar and prior to that I studied with Tara Singh in Los Angeles (http://www.josephplan.org/bio_TaraSingh.html). I was very close to Tara Singh for a number of years and dropped out of Oxford (I was on a path to study Evolutionary Biology with Richard Dawkins) but I suppose something in me knew the significance of Plato's story "The Cave" and lead me to Tara Singh. To use Winnie the Pooh as a metaphor - I suppose Pooh makes the most sense to me. Rabbit and Owl are lost in dissecting knowledge (Rabbit) or pretending to be wise (Owl), Piglet is overly anxious (but good natured), Eeyore is depressed, Tigger is lost in exotic adventures....I guess they all represent different phases of mind and life...but Pooh is just sort of grounded in enjoying the moment and the simplicity of things. I think it takes a lot of wisdom to come to such a place inside. I also feel it is innate and universal in all of us.
I am a deeply spiritual man but do not follow any religion per se. Truth is one....sages call it by many names. If I was to give a focus to my beliefs it would definitely be humanistic and I would simply say that I have studied most of the schools of psychology and gone very deeply into yoga philosophy....I valued that journey profoundly...but have seen beyond even that of late. As a child my primary interest was natural history but when I was working on a Whale Research boat in the Pacific a PhD scientist turned around to me and told me I asked too many questions (I was 19). I did find the answers to my questions - but they came through humanistic psychology. Plato, Groddeck, what Freud got right and Kenneth Wapnick and the Course in Miracles have had a profound impact on my world view.
I worked for many years as a massage therapist (recently in Singapore, but previously in Paris, LA and India). I ran an online bookshop in India and a small English tutoring school and had 14 staff.
My heroes: Peter Ustinov, Eddie Izzard, David Attenborough, Claudio Naranjo, Tara Singh, Eleanor Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson. Carl Jung, Krishnamurti Buckminster Fuller, Joseph Campbell, Jean Erdman, Magical realism authors.
Sense of humor is important to me. So is intelligence. Passion. Insight. Laughter. Life is far too important to take seriously
Thanks for reading and stopping by.
